mozz

Yeah. He killed like a million people by bungling the covid response, and conspired with one of America's shooting-war enemies (at least one) to get a whole bunch of CIA assets killed in the field. Like dozens of them. A foreign government hacked up an American journalist with bonesaws and took him out in pieces, and Trump came out and said, well they gave me a bunch of money so who cares about one journalist.

And all that is just the stuff that we know. He's like a supernova of treasonous and criminal behavior. No matter how bad you might estimate it is what he did, it's many many times worse.

even though I still take issue with the default seemingly being 'shill, unless enough effort is shown'.

Hey so check it out: That's not at all what I said. My criteria I listed for suspecting you of something dishonest were:

1. Reusing shill talking points
2. Using tactics like rampant strawmanning, just blandly pretending that someone said something different than they said and arguing against that instead of what they said.

Then I also mentioned that:

3. Since you seem like you're open to talking at this huge length which isn't usual for shills, that sort of makes me trust you again.

I have more to say, but I just wanna pause on this point for a second. Check this out:

Therein lies the pitfall of the shill-unless-proven-otherwise attitude - it makes it easy to characterize most people as shills

I literally never said that, or anything close to it. I listed two criteria that would fit a shill, and one that would exonerate someone from being a shill, and it sounds like you just totally edited away the first two and started telling me that I think everyone's a shill unless exonerated by the third.

Surely you can see how conducting the conversation like that would make someone conclude you're not speaking in good faith?

Like I say, I have more to say, but this is such a critical point that I want to pause and focus on it for a second.

No, nothing like that. I definitely had a whole class of nightmares that was the "severe evil presence" variety, but usually I would be fighting it, or like with some kind of capability, not just pure helpless terror about the sinister presence of it.

I've told some people to their face (virtually speaking) that I think they are shills and why. Ozma is one, and in this thread I said it to somebody else after looking over their user a little bit. My point was that I generally engage with their arguments on the merits at first, and then proceed to accusing them of bad faith if it seems really clear to me that they're engaging in bad faith; I don't think I usually engage in it as a reason not to engage with their arguments.

I've seen you speculate that midwest.social is a troll farm, based on what I assume is just your interactions with me

It wasn't from you. If I ever fully realized that you were from midwest.social I then forgot it; my instance doesn't show what someone's "home" instance is in comments unless I mouse over to investigate. It was a different user that raised my suspicion (who I didn't really engage with all that much, just observed the type of stuff they posted), and the overall nature and setup of the site. If that's relevant.

I'm not completely sure if you are a shill user or not. I have suspected it in the past. If I'm honest, you engage in some of the same types of behavior they do (using some particular talking points, and mischaracterizing what the other person is saying to a more convenient thing to argue against, being the most egregious), but that could just be what you feel like saying because you feel like saying it, and you also talk at length back and forth which is un-shill-like behavior, just because I think it's not really time-efficient for them to do that for any extended debate.

Honestly, except for really egregious examples like ozma, I don't feel like I can tell with any confidence who is and isn't fake, so I tend to talk to people on the merits and then talk about fake users as a systemic problem as a separate thing.

Even if it's not in response to what that person is saying, you're still encouraging others to disengage with them based on some false notion of them being bad-actors.

Yeah, maybe so. I think in general, accusing people of acting in bad faith is a bad way to go, just because it doesn't really lend itself to productive conversation (and I realize that's ironic since I do do exactly that sometimes). Definitely getting into the weeds of ad hominem, categorizing each person in the discussion as is or isn't a shill, shouldn't be the main thrust of the discussion. It's only relevant in this thread specifically with ozma because he does it like a full time frickin job.

That's the other side of that coin: if there's a cohort of users that is so clearly engaging in bad faith that it's distorting the overall conversation, I do feel like that's worth talking about. I don't think it's real productive to just play the sucker and keep saying "No actually Biden didn't ruin the US's climate change policy" over and over again indefinitely, without delving into why it is that so many people keep saying that he did and using the same very particular talking-point framing.

But yeah, the point about it being usually not really a friendly or productive thing to do to run around throwing accusations of shilling around, I'll somewhat agree with you on.

And it’s a comically huge number of people coming in; like people at every table and a huge line of people trying to come in, people standing around, at the tables and the bar wanting drinks and with little kids running around everywhere, and I’m there all by myself and for some reason trying to run around and do everything

I have had that one

Castigating people you disagree with as 'shills' or 'bad faith actors' is, in my opinion, the lowest quality of political commentary. It excuses you from engaging with what that person saying

Can you point to anyone who's said anything that I responded to without engaging on its own merits?

Everyone has a rosy view of themselves I am sure, but in my mind, I've spent an almost pathological amount of time here talking to ozma about the merits of what he's saying, on the face of them, and likewise for you, likewise for a lot of the other people. Then also in addition to that, if they display shill-like behavior I tend to call it out instead of just avoiding the potentially-unfair accusation. But I don't think I have ever really led out of the gate with anything along the lines of "you're a shill so that means I don't have to respond to what you just said".

Can you point to an example of someone who said something and I just dismissed what they were saying instead of breaking down why (in my view) it wasn't right, at least as a first step even if later I proceeded to what I thought of their motivations or changing the subject or etc?

"How dare you make me look like a misogynistic monster by putting up a perfectly sensible proposal which my misogynistically monstrous views will then cause me to vote against and make me look bad"

When I was younger, I had recurring nightmares of one particular place; it was kind of a big gothic castle-type house (mansion, something like that) in an outwardly nice grassy and wooded area. I could actually realize when I was there just from the landscape, even before I was near enough the building to see it.

Once I arrived at the building, the outside was just sort of creepy but ultimately harmless, but for some reason my task each time I had this dream was to get into the house, and start to go lower and more and more through locked or private areas of the castle into the darker basement and sub-basement, until it was almost like air ventilation ducts made of stone that I was squeezing through. The lower sections were dark and haunted with some kind of severe evil presence that sometimes I would run into or get near to.

It maybe isn't coming across as all that sinister just typing it out, but it was fuckin freaky being in the abandoned haunted basement area.

I talk from time to time about wanting to set up a forum where if you say something, you have to back it up, as a way to mitigate the impact of low-effort trolling "of COURSE we all agree Biden ruined the climate" from 5-10 different accounts as a technique to distort the discourse. I think it's toxic if it is politically slanted so that someone with mod power is deciding what is the "right" political viewpoint, obviously; on that much we will agree. But I do think that the discourse is being radically distorted by the existence of organized shilling efforts, and I think about what would be a good solution to it (which seems like a pretty difficult problem), in ways which I am sure would be wildly unpopular with a certain segment of the userbase.

You can characterize that as me thirsting to silence dissenting political views, if you want. I won't stop you.

I think we've long passed the point where it'd productive to go back and forth about it. But sure, a little bit longer maybe.

"I think Biden is bad, here is evidence for that opinion". And then someone who disagrees says "I think he's good, here's my evidence", and taken together you get a good picture

No.

Again: Starting with the result (who will benefit, who will look good and bad because of the analysis), and then looking for news that serves that conclusion, is dishonest. To me, and apparently to the mod team (or jordanlund at least).

Starting with facts about the world, and arriving at the result (who looks good and who looks bad as determined by what is happening), is honest. Again, this is my definition. You might have a different one which might also be reasonable, sure.

What you're describing is a little bit more like what happens in a courtroom, where it's someone's job to arrive at a particular conclusion, and they're going to marshal whatever level of evidence they can find to try to support it. It's also what's expected from someone who works in politics who's employed to support one particular interest no matter what. It's not how normal people behave outside of that type of very specialized setting, and I would argue that letting people who operate that way into the sphere (paid interests to come into the climate change debate, paid shills into online political discourse, advertisers into journalism, and so on) is a bad development in that sphere.

I think I've said my piece on it. You can disagree with my feeling, it is fine. But that is my feeling.

You're not missing anything. In one video a little piece of spit flew out of his mouth for like 2 frames, and in another he had a little glob of spit for like 5 frames, and then they played it slow motion and zoomed way in and repeated it a bunch of times because otherwise it would have been comically underwhelming.